Ten Solid State Drives from OCZ Technology. Page 2

Our today’s roundup is going to talk about solid state drives from OCZ. The ten products covered in this article include the simplest models, such as Onyx, alongside with the high-performance Vertex 2 SSD on SandForce controller.

OCZ Colossus Lite, 120 GB

Most of today’s SSDs are designed in the 2.5-inch form-factor but this model is a heavy-looking 3.5-inch brick. We’ve got a 120GB drive whereas the top model in this series has a storage capacity of 1 terabyte! How did they achieve that? Well, there are in fact a few full-featured Indilinx-based SSDs inside the case and they all seem to be combined into a RAID0 array using an additional controller. Consequently, the total amount of cache available to the controllers is as large as 128 megabytes. The specified speed is up to 260 MBps both at writing and reading. However, the sustained write speed of our model is only 140 MBps compared to 220 MBps of its larger-capacity counterparts. This may be due to the senior models representing a 4-channel array (otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to achieve a capacity of 1 terabyte with Indilinx controllers) whereas the junior model is a 2-channel array. This is but our supposition, though.

The Colossus Lite series has a twin which lacks the word Lite in its name and is positioned as an Enterprise rather than Performance one. The descriptions do not make the difference between them clear except for the speed of writing small data blocks and a slightly higher MTBF of the senior series.

This SSD does not support TRIM which must be the consequence of the additional RAID controller.

The firmware version is 1.0000.

OCZ Onyx, 32 GB

The value Onyx series comes in capacities of 32 and 64 gigabytes and is positioned as affordable boot disks (by the way, we covered an opponent to this model, Intel X25-V, in our previous article). The Onyx is based on the well-known Indilinx Barefoot controller with 64 megabytes of cache. But as far as we know, the number of controller channels has been reduced due to the small amounts of flash memory. Together with some other possible changes, this has affected the speed specs. The Onyx has a peak read speed of 125 MBps (135 MBps for the 64GB model) and a peak write speed of 70 MBps. It supports TRIM.

As opposed to the other SSDs in this review, this model has firmware version 1.51.